“There is very little class consciousness in this country,” said a labor union leader I recently had the good fortune to work with. “So, if the labor movement is going to grow, build strength, win victories and win more political power, we need to build coalitions with the community,” he concluded. If this viewpoint weren’t widely held by many trade unionists, I might suspect him of being a Marxist-Leninist. Another union and community activist told me: “People on the left say all the time that we need one big Party. Well that’s not going to happen soon. So we need to build coalitions if we have any chance of advancing democratic struggles.” Another profoundly insightful remark. So what does Marxism have to say about the importance of coalitions?
The first Marxist remarks on coalition building might have been by Marx himself. In some of his works that describe the mid-19th century European revolutions, Marx makes some important points. At the time the industrial working class was not very well organized. The trade-union movement was still emerging, industrial workers represented a minority of the working class as a whole and held little or no political power. So Marx tended to highlight moments when the workers sought alliances with non-proletarian class strata and movements. Sometimes these alliances crossed class boundaries to include sections of the bourgeoisie. While he remained skeptical of these kinds of coalitions (he always assumed that non-workers would abandon workers), he pointed to their practical necessity.
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